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So will you need to “learn Sharepoint” for FIM?

One of the questions I was asked at my demo yesterday was “how much will I need to learn about Sharepoint to run FIM?” - which is a fair enough question, considering the emphasis on the Portal and the Sharepoint aspects.

After a moment’s reflection my answer was “well… none really”. So far, with ILM “2″, I haven’t felt I needed to know anything much about Sharepoint, apart from how to navigate around the Portal - something anyone with a few mouse skills could do. Changing the layout of the default forms is very easy as well - all it takes is a bit of basic XML.

As I said to this chap yesterday, the hardest thing I found was when I tried to have a go at developing my own workflow element - now that was hard! But as I was co-presenting with my lovely collegue from our sister company, specialists in Sharepoint and development, I was able to point to him and say “but you can always get an expert to develop them for you!” :-)

2009 05 29 Carol ILM "2"
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I’m presenting ILM “2″ at expertDay tomorrow - en français

I haven’t had much to post about lately as I’ve been doing a lot of work with Exchange 2003 and Symantec Enterprise Vault (cool product!) - but tomorrow I’ll be briefly back in the ILM world again, presenting at the annual conference of the company I work for.

And I’m going to try and do it in french!

Actually I’ll only be doing the demo and my collegue will do most of the talking through the slides (fortunately!). The demo is going to focus on self-service group population, which I do believe to be absolutely the best OOB feature of ILM “2″ RC0. Now if I can just get all my verbs and nouns in the right order and tenses, I should do ok. Wish me luck!

2009 05 27 Carol Conferences Comments (0) Permalink

Exchange 2007 Failover and Failback with SCR

I’ve been doing a bit of work with SCR lately, the point being to achieve a “poor man’s failover” for the mailbox server role. Not everyone needs the immediacy, or the expense, of a cluster, and SCR was a welcome addition to the redundacy capabilities of Exchange 2007 - but I couldn’t find a complete step-by-step resource for failover and failback so, after having worked it all out myself, here it all is. Continue reading ›

2009 04 27 Carol Exchange 2007 Comments (0) Permalink

Exchange 2007 Outlook Anywhere on Windows 2008 IPv6 bug - the fix breaks SCR!

Just a quick post about this technote: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671176.aspx

It claims this bug was fixed in rollup 4, but after struggling with a server with rollup 7 installed for many hours today, I can confirm that this bug is not fixed, and you do need to follow the procedure in the technote.

The bug concerns Outlook Anywhere (what used to be called RPC over HTTP). If the Exchange 2007 server is installed on Windows 2008 server your clients can’t connect until you follow the technote and then reboot the Exchange server.

Unfortunately, after implementing this “fix” Outlook Anywhere was working - but the SCR replication I had set up between the servers was broken! The replication status was “Disabled”. I tried everything to get it started again but was getting a bunch of new errors about having used a “simple server name” instead of the FQDN - despite using exactly the same powershell commands that had worked before.

Finally I backed out the hosts file change from the above technote and I’m back where I was before - SCR working but Outlook Anywhere broken.

Not happy.

2009 04 23 Carol Exchange 2007 Comments (0) Permalink

Adding Exchange 2007 mailboxes to existing users - Part 2

A while back I proposed  a powershell XMA approach to the problem of adding Exchange 2007 mailboxes to existing AD users. This was because my old method of adding an Exchange 2003 mailbox by populating a couple of extra attributes did not work with Exchange 2007.

However, in  a recent thread on the Technet forum, Michael D’Angelo listed all the attributes that he has found are needed for an Exchange 2007 mailbox, and they are as follows:

msExchPoliciesExcluded
msExchPoliciesIncluded
proxyAddresses
mailNickname
textEncodedORAddress
msExchMailboxSecurityDescriptor
homeMDB
homeMTA
legacyExchangeDN
mDBUseDefaults
msExchHomeServerName
msExchMailboxGuid
msExchRecipientDisplayType
msExchRecipientTypeDetails
msExchUserAccountControl
msExchVersion

It’s a much longer list than for Exchange 2003, but nothing that can’t be handled with flow rules. So it looks like the old Exchange 2003 method should work for 2007 after all.

2009 04 05 Carol Exchange 2007
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TEC 2009 - a personal roundup

The US TEC 2009 is now over, and what a great week it’s been.

This was the first year that Quest were running the show, and as far as I could tell it was very much business as usual for the conference, with the welcome addition of an Exchange track to the usual Directory and ILM tracks.

This conference is well-known for emphasizing practical, BTDT sessions from consultants working in the field over marketing and “slide-ware”, and in that aspect it did not disappoint - and while the shock of the new ILM 2 release date did put a dampener on day one for me, at least the conference also gave me the opportunity to speak directly to Microsoft ILM product team people on the subject.

Following are a few of my personal highlights.

Continue reading ›

2009 03 27 Carol AD
Conferences
Exchange
ILM "2"
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ILM 2 release date put back - A WHOLE YEAR!

I’m at TEC 2009 in Las Vegas at the moment, and it was officially announced by Microsoft today that the release date for ILM 2 is now Q1 2010, as opposed to the previously publicised date of “any day now”. We should be getting an RC1 version in Q3 this year.

I asked if there were any technical reasons for this, hoping to hear of some impressive new development that they figured they couldn’t go to market without - but the answer was no, the features list is set. Why the long delay then? There was something about needing more real-world testing, and the need to develop scenario guidelines (I suppose that means walkthroughs), but that was the only explanation.

There is apparently some way you can get a pre-release license from Microsoft if you’re really determined to go ahead with ILM 2 in production, but I expect most organisations will not accept this, putting ILM 2 well and truly off the cards for 2009.

2009 03 23 Carol Conferences
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TechDays 2009 Geneva

If anyone is in the Geneva area, and has not yet registered for TechDays, I believe there are still some places available: http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/fr/techdays/Default.aspx

I will be presenting a session on ILM “2″ of course.

2009 03 19 Carol Conferences
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ILM2 RC0 - Updating Portal objects the no-code way

I am working on a demo scenario :  Certain information about users (name, department, job title, start date) should come direct from HR or from a simplified User Create form; other account-specific stuff (account name, mail nickname, mail database) should be automatically populated; and the account should be provisioned to AD/Exchange when all information is present and correct.

Unfortuantely this has been proving trickier than I would have liked, and the main culprit is the Function Evaluator. This little workflow action is supposed to be able to assign values to attributes in the portal but, as it turns out, is completely broken in RC0.

I struggled for some time with the Ensynch guys’ posts on how to build your own replacement for the Function Evaluator (see here and here) - but, not being much of a programmer, this proved too much for me. I have now found myself a satisfactory workaround using a good old fashioned MIIS approach (and some codeless provisioning rules). Continue reading ›

2009 03 02 Carol AD
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ILM2 RC0 - Provisioning Exchange 2007 Users

This post builds on yesterday’s which should be read first.  Following are the extra Sync Rule and MA configurations that I made which added the Exchange 2007 support.
Continue reading ›

2009 02 25 Carol AD
Exchange 2007
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